26 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
26 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
\section{Some Seem Born with Longing}
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\lettrine{S}{ome} seem born with Longing. We encounter figures of extraordinary productivity who, as far as we can discern, simply arrived in the world already reaching.
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\subsubsection{Mozart (1756--1791)}
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed over 600 works across every major genre --- symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music, sacred music --- in a career that lasted barely thirty years. He composed with an extraordinary, seemingly effortless fluency.
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He died at thirty-five in Vienna, poor and professionally frustrated by the politics of patronage. But the Longing that drove him to the pen seems to have been native to him from earliest childhood.
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\subsubsection{Euler (1707--1783)}
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Leonhard Euler ("OIL-er") produced more important mathematics than any single human before or since --- over 800 papers and books. A body of work so vast that scholars are still publishing his complete works more than two centuries after his death — in part because to properly edit and annotate them, they must first be understood.
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He worked across number theory, topology, graph theory, mechanics, astronomy, and a dozen other domains with the same relentless productivity. And although the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter had been known for millennia, Euler popularized calling it π.
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Euler was born in Basel in 1707, trained under the Bernoulli family (a dynasty of mathematicians), and spent most of his career in St. Petersburg and Berlin, embedded in the intellectual courts of Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. He fathered thirteen children, maintained an astonishing correspondence, and continued publishing at full capacity even after going blind in both eyes --- a condition that, by his own account, barely slowed him. His life was peripatetic but not tragic. He simply never stopped working.
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\subsubsection{Darwin (1809--1882)}
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Charles Darwin spent five years aboard the HMS Beagle as a naturalist, observing the variation of finches, mockingbirds, and tortoises across the Galápagos, the adaptation of barnacles, and the distribution of coral reefs. He returned to England and spent the next thirty years assembling evidence, conducting experiments, corresponding with breeders and naturalists, synthesizing what he had seen into his \textit{Origin of Species} which would revolutionize biology. The work was primary. He was born a naturalist and remained one.
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\subsubsection{Ramanujan (1887--1920)}
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Srinivasa Ramanujan ("rah-MAH-nu-jan") was born in 1887 in a small town in Tamil Nadu, India, to a Brahmin family of modest means. He taught himself mathematics from a single borrowed book and developed an extraordinary intuition for number theory without formal training or peer community. He simply `knew' profound mathematical insights without deriving them — as though the numbers spoke to him directly.
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He corresponded with the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy (a world-class mathematician of his day). Hardy recognized in Ramanujan's work a kind of mathematical genius he had never encountered — not learned, not reasoned in the conventional way, but intuited.
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Ramanujan came to Cambridge, where his collaboration with Hardy flourished and produced proofs of stunning originality. He died in 1920 at thirty-two, likely from tuberculosis exacerbated by the English climate and the strain of displacement from home.
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